The Casquette Girls (Book 1)

8. Bisous, bisous

Completely frazzled, I took off in the wrong direction. Luckily, I'd only covered one block before I came to my senses and detoured onto Bourbon Street.

Usually at this hour, employees would be receiving truckloads of inventory and hosing out the proof of last night's vices from barroom floors. Usually I had to hold my breath because of the rank, aromatic meld of stale beer, ashtrays, bleach, and garbage baking in the end-of-summer heat. But this morning that was not necessary. Today there was only one man in view, and he wasn't hosing. He was just leaning against the entranceway of the Court of Two Sisters, smoking a cigarette, shaking his head.

I looped onto Orleans Avenue and sped up, partly out of excitement and partly because my bags of nonperishables were getting heavy.

This particular block, where Café Orléans was located, was one of my favorite streets in the city-I loved its duality. At the far end was one of the loudest blocks of Bourbon, home of the infamous hand grenade: a toxic-green melon cocktail served in a plastic yard glass shaped like an explosive device and touted as the world's most powerful drink. The opposite end of the short block dead-ended in St. Anthony's Garden, the back courtyard of the St. Louis Cathedral. New Orleans, like this street block, was a place of contradictions. Especially in the French Quarter, you could never guess what you'd find.

Seeing the wooden sign for Café Orléans hanging from its chains caused a rush of excitement to fill my chest-I'd helped Sébastien climb up and take it down before his family evacuated, so they must have returned.

I stood in the doorway and watched as the four of them bustled about.

Sébastien Michel and his twin sister, Jeanne, were the closest things to siblings I had. Their grandparents, natives of France, had raised them since they were nine, after their parents, who had apparently been big-time archeologists, both died when something went wrong during an excavation. Mémé and Pépé Michel had been like surrogate parents to me too, ever since my mother left. Because they had a French-speaking household, my father wouldn't allow anyone else to babysit me when I was a child. It was his version of language immersion/torturing me. French wasn't widely spoken in New Orleans anymore, so it wasn't particularly useful, but he did it because it was supposedly important to my mother. He always seemed sad when he reminded me of that, so I never fought him on it.

Mémé and Pépé were wiping down the furniture with something that smelled like pine. Jeanne was tugging on her wheat-blond hair while meticulously recording inventory on a clipboard, and Sébastien was lugging in a giant sack of coffee beans from the back alley.

I tried to put my bags down gently, but the weight of the canned goods made a clank. Everyone paused and turned their heads in unison.

"Adele!" cried the twins, cueing everyone to hustle over and make a fuss. French, English, everyone talking over each other-after spending so much time alone recently, it felt like a party.

Jeanne threw her arms around me. "Comment était Paris? I want to know everything!"

"Misérable," I replied. "Tout le monde parle français à Paris!"

She laughed. "Well, it's a good thing you have such a brilliant French tutor! Wow, your accent is better than mine now! Très impressionnant."

When I was nine, my father decided immersion wasn't enough and started paying Jeanne to teach me things like grammar.

"J'en doute. I seriously doubt it." I couldn't imagine ever being better than Jeanne at anything. The twins were only four years older than me, but she was about to finish her PhD in biochemistry, was dating a surgical resident, and had the confidence of a beauty queen-all of this before she was legally able to drink. Maybe that's what happens when you get to skip the formidable high school years? Yes, the twins were both supergeniuses. All the elite universities had offered them spots during the evacuation, but they refused to go anywhere without Mémé and Pépé. I loved how tight-knit they all were.